Garry Barker: Exhibition Coming Up

If you want to have a look at what I've been up to lately I have an exhibition preview coming up on Friday the 16th of October. You can find a map of how to get there here. The work will be mainly printed and woven textiles with ceramics, however there will be a few drawings to see. As you may have gathered from some of my recent conversations in the studio, I'm very interested in how materials and processes used carry embedded meanings within them, in this case the tapestries I'm showing were woven with chenille yarns on jacquard looms by the Manual Woodworkers and Weavers Company, in the USA. Chenille is the French word for caterpillar whose fur the yarn is supposed to resemble. Of course the caterpillar is often used in allegorical tales of transformation. Chenille is manufactured by placing short lengths of yarn, called the "pile", between two "core yarns" and then twisting the yarn together. The edges of these piles then stand at right angles to the yarn’s core, giving chenille the ability to appear changed when looked at from different angles. This particular quality again has allegorical potential. Jacquard looms were controlled by chains of punched cards fitted together into continuous sequences; multiple rows of holes were punched on each card, with one complete card corresponding to one row of the design. The Jacquard loom was vital to the development of computing, the ability to change the pattern of the loom's weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor in the development of computer programming. Contemporary Jacquard looms are now computer controlled. A skill-set once vital to the textile industry now like the labour force that had those skills, now redundant. My pixelated images, moving between the hand drawn and the digital, finally re-realised in an archaic form, the tapestry, constructed geographically far away, but with a Global immediacy because of the Web. The web itself a textile metaphor, now interwoven with a history of labour.West Yorkshire once a world renowned centre for textiles manufacture has seen the entire industry migrate to the far East and the USA. This process continues, Global capitalism destabilising whole communities as it crushes those who labour and rewards those who invest. The products in this forthcoming exhibition are in their production enmeshed within a network of Global Capital.  As Albert J. Dunlap stated, 'The company belongs to the people who invest in it - not to its employees, suppliers, nor the locality in which it is situated.' This is a quote taken from Zygmunt Bauman's 'Globalization: The Human Consequences' a book that highlights the links between the processes of Capitalism, the unequal distribution of wealth and the current refugee and migrant crisis. I believe we are collectively 'In Breach of Trust', the coming exhibition being an attempt to open out a poetic dialogue around a subject that at times feels impossible to deal with in terms of an art practice, but which at the same time feels too important not to.